Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (11 page)

Alli, he thought, where the hell are you? What’s happening to you?

He was powerless to stop his thoughts moving toward Emma. His longing to talk with his daughter, so that she could spread the balm of forgiveness over him, brought tears to his eyes. His hands shook.

It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Schiltz’s advice came back to him like an echo in a cave. He knew his friend was right, but God forgive him, he couldn’t stop. He was like an alcoholic with a bottle to his mouth. Every fiber in his being ached for the chance to say he was sorry, to tell Emma how much he loved her. Why was it, he asked himself despairingly, that he could acknowledge his love for her only now, when it was too late? He slammed his fist against the steering wheel, making the car shiver around him like Jell-O.

He looked up, unsure whether it was the rain or his tears he was
seeing. He felt, rather than saw, a shimmer, as if the shadowy air at the corners of his vision rippled like the surface of Bear Creek Lake. Startled, he looked around and smelled Emma’s scent. Was that her face he saw staring back at him in the rearview mirror? He whirled around, but his nose was filled with the cloying stench of hot metal, stripped rubber, and burnt flesh.

Gasping, he wrenched open the door, stumbled to his knees on the asphalt, head hanging down. The rain fell on him with an indifference that made him pound his fist against the car door. Pulling himself up on the door handle, he peered through the rain-beaded window. The backseat was empty. As he rested his forehead against the glass, his mind whirled backwards, into the dark whirlpool of the past.

He had taken Emma, Egon, and Molly to Cumberland State Forest to hike and fish in Bear Creek Lake. The girls were ten. He had bought Emma a Daisy air rifle. One afternoon she had come running back to camp, her eyes streaming with tears. She had aimed her rifle at a bluebird sitting on the branch of a pine and pulled the trigger. She’d never believed she would hit the bird, let alone kill it, but that’s precisely what had happened.

She was heartsick, beyond consoling. Jack suggested that they have a funeral and burial. The physical preparations seemed to calm her. But she’d cried all over again when Jack shoveled the dirt over the pathetic fallen bird. Then Emma took the air rifle, hurled it with all her strength into the lake. It sank like a stone, ripples spiraled out from its grave.

That was the last time Jack could remember really being with his daughter. After that, what happened? She grew up too fast? They grew apart too quickly? He was at a loss to understand where the time had gone or how Emma had changed. It was as if he had fallen asleep on a speeding train. He might never have woken up if it hadn’t been for the crash.

Schiltz opened the door in response to Jack’s pounding. His rubber gloves were slick with unspeakable substances.

He moved away from the door so Jack could come in. “You look like roadkill. What happened to you downstairs?”

Jack, immersed in the horror of his own personal prison, almost told Schiltz about his ghostly visitations, but he had a conviction that they weren’t visitations at all, merely wishful thinking, as if he could wish Emma back to life, or some transparent semblance of life. On the other hand, who but Egon, seeing God’s hand in the incredible, the unexplainable, might understand. Nevertheless, Jack chose to keep silent on the matter. It was too personal, too humiliating—he’d seem like a child lost in a ghost story.

“I ran into something that disagreed with me.” Sharon constantly accused him of hiding his true feelings behind sarcasm. What did she know?

The offices were shadowed, hushed. Carpeted and wood-paneled, they were a jarring contrast with the banks of stainless steel deathbeds, sluicing hoses, giant floor drains, vats of chemicals, rows of microscopes, tiers of body blocks used to elevate the cadavers’ chests for easier entry, drawers filled with the forensic implements of morphology and pathology: bone saws, bread knives, enterotomes, hammers, rib cutters, skull chisels, Striker saws, scalpels, and Hagedorn needles to sew up the bodies when work was done. Jack and Egon skirted the X-ray room and the toxicology lab, went through the standards room, as refined as a Swiss watchmaker’s, as blunt as a butcher shop, where cadavers as well as their major organs were weighed and measured. Even in the short corridor they felt the icy breath of the cold room, dim, blued, impersonal as a terminal, hushed as a library.

“So what brings you back? Nowhere else to go on a rainy December night?” Schiltz gestured at the wall of cadaver containers. “Since
I’m not full up, I could give you an overnight berth in my Japanese hotel. It’s quiet as the grave and a gourmet continental breakfast is served in the autopsy room starting at eight. Would you like an upper or a lower berth?”

Jack laughed. Egon had the uncanny ability to dislodge his depressions.

“I’m interested in whichever berths the two Secret Service men are in.”

“Ah, yes,” Egon said. “The men in black.”

Having a sense of humor—the darker the better—was essential for an ME, Egon once told Jack. “Professional detachment only gets you so far, because eventually someone gets under your skin,” his friend had once told him. “After that, it’s every macabre jokester for himself.”

Schiltz moved Jack along the rows of gleaming stainless steel containers, opened two side by side at waist height. “In my fascination with your floating island, I forgot all about them. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do the original autopsies. The law now mandates that in cases of deaths of federal officials, pathologists from the Army Forces Institute of Pathology do the work.” He shrugged. “Idiotic, if you ask me, but that’s the government for you.”

The two cadavers lay on their backs, even features waxy, doll-like, their chests cut and sewn back up in the autopsy T-scar that went from just beneath the collarbone to the lower intestine. “The pathology is yesterday’s paper so far as your new compadres are concerned. They came, they saw, they were dead-ended.”

“Nothing at all?” Jack said.

“I performed my own autopsies just to make certain. Not so much as a partial print, a stray hair, a scrap of skin, paint or dirt under the nails. No hint of anything that might lead you to ID the perps.” Schiltz shrugged again. “Not much to see, either. One stab apiece—hard, direct,
no hesitation whatsoever—interstitial, between the third and fourth dorsal ribs, straight into the heart.” He paused. “Well, sort of.”

Jack’s own heart had begun a furious tattoo. “What d’you mean?”

Schiltz turned the first cadaver onto one side, shoved it to the far side of the deathbed, turned it on its stomach. As he performed the same procedure with the second body, Jack peered at the entry wound.

“See here. I peeled back the muscle so I could get a closer look at the interior wounds. Smooth as silk, so the assailant didn’t use a serrated blade, but there was a slight curve to them. I can’t quite make out what sort of blade would leave that signature.”

But I can,
Jack thought. He’d seen that odd, slightly arced wound before, once, twenty-five years ago. His subsequent investigation, all on his own, both dangerous and difficult, had unearthed the murder weapon: a thin-bladed knife, known as a paletta. It was used by professional bakers to spread batter or apply frosting. The truly odd part was this: A paletta had a rounded end. It was totally useless for a stabbing attack. This one, however, was unique among palettas: the murderer had ground the end into a mercilessly sharp point.

“You okay?” Schiltz peered into Jack’s frozen face.

“You bet,” Jack said in a strangled voice.

“Stole up behind them and bingo! No fuss, no muss.” Schiltz’s slightly bored tone indicated he’d been over this terrain numerous times in the past twenty-four hours. “Most professional, not to say impressive, especially in light of the victims’ training. In fact, I would venture to say the stabs were surgical in their precision. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have done a better job of it myself.”

Jack hardly heard his friend’s last sentence. He was frozen, bent over in the space between the deathbeds, his gaze flickering back and forth between the two wounds. His galloping heart seemed to have come to an abrupt and terrifying halt inside his chest.

It’s absolutely stone-cold impossible,
he told himself.
I shot Cyril Tolkan while he was trying to escape over the rooftop where I’d trapped him. He’s dead, I know he is.

And yet, the evidence of his own eyes was irrefutable. These stabs were the hallmark of a killer Jack had gone after twenty-five years ago, after a murder that had left him devastated, sick with despair.

Part 2

10

Jack, at fifteen, often cannot sleep. It might be a form of insomnia, but most likely not. He has good reason to stay awake. He lives in a slope-shouldered row house so close to the border of Maryland, it seems as if the District wants it exiled. At night, bedeviled by a fog of anxious stirrings, he lies in bed, staring at the traffic light at the junction of New Hampshire and Eastern Avenues. He lives, eats, and breathes by the rhythm of its changing from red to green. Outside his window, at the eastern border of the District, the city roars, barks, whines, squeals, growls like a pack of feral dogs, glassy-eyed with hunger. Inside the row house, the darkness is filled with dread. It seems to grip his head like a vise squeezed tighter and tighter until he gasps, shoots up in a fountain of bedclothes. This moment is crucial. If the light is green, everything will be okay. But if it’s red … His heart pounds; the roaring in his ears dizzies him. Disaster.

When he could bear to look back on those nights, he understood that the color of the traffic light didn’t matter. The reliance on the pattern set by unknown city workers is an illusion of control over the
parts of his life he dreads. But like all children, he relies on illusion to keep his terrors in Pandora’s box.

Between the hours of one and three in the morning, his ears are attuned to the heavy tread of his father’s footsteps as he returns from work. This particular night is no different. It is June and stifling, not even the smallest squares of laundry stir on the line. A dog lies wheezing asthmatically in the ashy buttocks of the empty lot next to the auto chop shop. An old man wheezes, coughs so long and hard, Jack is afraid he’ll hawk up a lung.

The sounds creep in, as if the apartment itself is protesting his father’s weight. Every one of the tiny but separate noises that mark his father’s slow progress through it sends a squirt of blood into Jack’s temples, causing him to wince in pain.

Sometimes that was all that happened, the sounds would gradually ebb, Jack would lie back down, his heartbeat would return to normal, and eventually, he’d drift into a restless sleep. But at other times, the first bars of “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas creep into his room, and his heart starts to pound and he has to force himself not to vomit all over the sheets.

“I’d be safe and warm …”

The three slices of pepperoni pizza Jack had for dinner rise as if from a magician’s wand.

“… if I was in L.A….”

Stomach acid burns his throat, and he thinks,
Oh God, he’s coming.

The melody takes on a life of its own. Like the notes of a snake charmer, it’s filled with an ominous meaning at odds with its original sunny disposition. And like the cobra that hovers and strikes at will, digging its fangs deep into flesh, his father stalks him, the thick black belt he bought in a biker shop in Fort Washington, Maryland, held loosely in his left hand.

It was a time-honored ritual in the McClure household, this whipping. It would have been so much better if the cause had been alcohol
because then it wouldn’t have been Jack’s fault. But it
is
Jack’s fault. How many times has his father browbeaten the fact into him?

And Jack’s mother, what is her part in this ritual? She stays in her bedroom, behind a tightly closed door that leaks “California Dreamin’” every time her husband wraps the belt around the knuckles of his left fist. Jack, a living example of Skinnerian psychology, prepares himself for the pain when he hears the first bars of flower power sweetly, innocently sung.

Fists aren’t what frighten Jack, though his father possesses the big, knuckly rocks of a bricklayer or an assassin. By adult standards, his father isn’t particularly big, but with his dark eyes, sullen mouth, and broken nose, he seems like a colossus to Jack. Especially when he’s swinging the belt. Following Neanderthal instincts, he turned the biker belt into an ugly, writhing thing. Its armor of metal studs, its crown a buckle big as two fists are not enough. He filed the corners to points one sunny Sunday when Jack was out playing softball.

“Tell me a story, read me a book,” his father says as he opens the door to his son’s room. He looks around at the unholy mess of clothes, comics, magazines, records, bits of candy bars and chocolate. “Books, books, where are the friggin’ books?” He bends down, swipes up a comic. “Batman,” he says with a sneer. “How the fuck old are you?”